Part 2
Then why not, like Empedocles, Lower our limbs into volcano-craters, And make the world believe that mighty God Translated us into His company On dolphins’ backs across a nectar lake, To share the glory of His attributes, His love like myrrh and incense and the fruits That dangle from exotic herbs and trees All gold and ripe as from Hesperides?
An architect of ruin onion-eyed Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry Has cast the die of quick finality Among the cheese-mites in this gap of time. Through Chaos: murmurs, stumblings, hordes that rend The fabric which is called reality. The light, which was a sluice of molten gold, The crystal winds, disperse in empty air.
The deep red empty holes which were our eyes Sense only burstings of electric globes. Louder the heat, like vitriol, wounds our ears Burning with dull blue thunder. And then--a tune upon the piccolo, One of the musical Unemployed, I know, Or some stray angel with pink sugar wings Trying to see the cheerful side of things!
_In the Train de Luxe_
“It is dangerous to lean out of the window.” No doubt, when meteors shoot athwart the night. No doubt, no doubt; and yet it haunts the sight. I read, re-read this ponderous advice In French and English; play a game of dice With mental clouds through cannonades of hours, With foamless islands legioned with lush flow’rs, Prismatic juicy glades bee-pasturing.
“In case of danger you must pull the ring.” A girl arranges a mellifluous grin: Eternal teas and afternoons begin To lurk within the forests of the mind With vividness that cuts it like a wind. And while my nostrils draw the vital air, They quiver to discern the sweat of hair In awkward crevices! _Signal d’Alarme_ Recalls the fact that I am safe from harm.
I count, re-count each pendulum and beat. Pardie! the train has swollen in the heat; Freighted with smuts he heaves his metal breasts, Nor heeds the broad and burning moon’s behests. (The moon is lingering and luminous. Mired in a wrinkling silk diaphanous She floats a supple pose upon the air And whispers invitations.) “I don’t care!” The train replies; although his body glows, He is austere as tempest-sifted snows, Pursuing moral dumb-bell exercise To muscle-burst criterion; he defies Flesh and its shuddering spurts of harlotry. Pavilioned on hills of chastity, “I do not care a damn,” the train replies.
_The Prodigal Son_
The young man yawned with feigned inconsequence Of manner; boredom exquisite; a fence To hide the quick explosions in his soul. He sucked at his surroundings, and the whole Grim agony of his dull youth returned, The blue fins of his sullen eyelids burned, He could have mouthed a curse, an oath obscene: For horror at the glib familiar scene A clayey lump stuck blistered in his throat. Chrysallic faces, garlic, myosote, And rows of beans and artichokes, a field Interminably patterned, jigged and reeled Along the corridors of memory.
“Is childhood happy? dismal fallacy! And yet I am not one of those who think That lilies smell not, orange-flowers stink.” Here had the best hours coolly leaked away Like driblets from a tap, a disarray Of tumbled hispid stars; a clean dry sleep Of stunted senses, where he could not weep For ignorance. And ever shone the moon; The warm sky twinkled like a chopped lagoon. “This world is but a foggy circumstance,” He thought, “where timid mortals must advance To claim their rights and drain what cup of joy It has to offer, now no longer boy I’ll cease to play the rôle of Tantalus, But leave this place, discharge a blunderbuss Against my present drawling mode of life. I’m still too young to bear the plague of wife, And though ’tis true, when all fine things be said, I’m welcome to a partner for my bed, To kiss a gaping throat of flaccid silk; I fear her plump white breasts would hold no milk To suckle babes on, after I had done With kissing at her nipples; one by one Each new-born babe would wither up and die.”
He picked his teeth and fetched a windy sigh, Informed his father of his bold resolve, Who told him of the cost it would involve: So, settling up accounts, he bade farewell To all the damned of his domestic hell.
Oh _wagon-lits_ and tickets bought from Cook’s, Surpassing all the fairy-tales in books! Warm exhalations, streets with spicy smells And oh, the Poe-like harmonies of bells! Venice and Ruskin and _The Deadly Lamps_, The pulsing cafés and patchouli’d vamps With sticky flowers in their copper hair, The languid music throbbing on the air! The Watteau _fêtes galantes_, the bistre-brown Sombrero’d poets, yet without a crown To purchase food; the graceful unwashed hands And flung-proud gestures of these Southern lands! The tiny shiny shoes with pointed tips And carmine-rouged pursed petulance of lips! But all the while the young man’s pockets burned, And all the while he piteously yearned For lucre; many azure nights he’d lain With shirt-front soaked and squelching in champagne And pleasures, money, all are volatile, For after belching Pol-Roger the bile Will wreak revenge.
And thus it came about That when his full supply had given out, The harlots would no longer share his bed; Since he could pay no cash, they, laughing, said: “One sucks the orange, throws away the peel.” The young man’s vanity forbade him kneel As penitent before his father’s glare, Before the well-staged patronising stare Of his familiar family--poor things-- How they would love to clip his phœnix-wings!
So he became a labourer and slept In musty garrets where the grey mice crept, With cobwebs and the gibbering of bats And scuttling cockroaches, and lice, and rats Who dragged their heavy bellies on the floor Thud, thud and thud; the creaking of the door In twilight cavernous, the broken pane Through which the hiss and crackle of the rain Would slant in rivulets across the planks, The thunder tramped, the lightning played his pranks Like a young leopard prancing from the skies Divinely, whilst the tough wind slapped its thighs.
Through dismal days he sweated at the plough. And half a crust beneath an apple-bough Became his nourishment, and so he thinned In figure-line; the sweltering east wind And thick-flamed sun had bronzed his body quite.... And often through the oozing hours of night He’d sing a sparkling catch of better times-- No longer pedant à propos of rhymes,
He’d hum or whistle: “Gosh, she looks immense, You never met a girl like sweet Hortense,” With genuine emotion in his throat. But soon he was reduced to pawning coat And hat; dismissed for superflux of dreams Or bathing on hot afternoons in streams When there was corn to reap, or hay to store In soporific barns; and all the more He dreamt of silken harlots, velvet wine. A tender farmer let him tend the swine.
With weighty flanks well caked in slime, a sow Grunted and suckled farrow, whilst a cow Lowed like a mellow snore; a mastiff whined To demonstrate sheer vacancy of mind. “Shall I arise and go? ’tis not too late To gain an entrance to my father’s gate.” The young man shook his head and muttered “No, Nor shall arise, nor to my father go.” He had acquired a preference to dine On scraps amongst the confidential swine.
_Ventilation_
Open the window! now that breezes play Over the wrinkled hills; the sweltering day Fused by the wedge-shaped engines of the sun With heat intensive, split as flowers spun Of glass to myriad particles minute With spot-like swiftness, hovers chilled and mute.
Now that no far voice cleaves the air or blurs, No plash, no fall of oars, no rumour stirs, And life itself has long outbreathed its lungs-- (Or so it seems, for no dim amorous tongues Trouble the foliage, and the moon is full, Unflecked by wind-froth); all seems sorrowful With beauty exanimate, a beauty dead, A subterranean silence where vague dread Puckers the brooding soul until it weeps Terrible heavy tears. The garden sleeps.... Sleeps as the desolate magnificence Of Angkor with its grave mute eloquence Where blistering suns, invectives of the wind Hurl vainly; frenzied storms undisciplined Beat, plunge inanely at the steadfast walls. And no sad throat of nightingale enthralls The quickly-pulsing heart with turbulent song.
So massive has the stillness grown, so strong A blood-vessel would burst, a muscle snap, A sane malt mind would rave, grow weak as pap.... Oh aching ears, have you too heard the lips Of silence utter some apocalypse To slake the agony of my desires, To scatter them like ashes of the pyres Of calcined and cremated limbs? but hark In the faint failing distances what spark Of flashed sound quivers? hold your breath, what flush Of fluid moan? The sluice is opened; rush And avalanche of panic-writhing cries. Some soul in anguish is it? vague surmise As of some tragedy--I shudder, shake With fear.... It is the peacocks by the lake!
_After_
The sky is very blue to-day, And the soft turf yields To each well-fitting shoe; so they Bring their bananas and sandwiches To munch on the battle-fields.
O, why has Nature taken such a sheen, Why does the grass grow green, So cruelly green? O, surely it must wither in the spate Of clashing contumacious worlds of agony and hate! How can the sun keep pace so? why not reel, White steel, Or stagger ankleted with yawning fire Neath the tremendous byre? But the absurd courageous clouds Look on, look on In bustling business crowds, They con A Masse-Mensch imaginary power. They do not cower Before the charabancs’ toot toot a toot And men who bring their sandwiches to boot, And break beer-bottles where men’s souls were torn By invisible billion hands ... where agony was born. There is a lady in an orange gown.
(Did not those shrieks hang airily down, Suspended for eternity to hear, A thousand tired stars over a shattered town Not formed enough to speak, but formed enough to shriek And formed enough to make men fear?)
Not so. The roses dangle deep asleep, Men play Bo-peep With poor worn-out banalities, Sentimentalities, Tepid-with-languor-lilies And daffodillies. We shall have each wind-melody dictated And by Puccini orchestrated, And from innumerable Noah’s arks Those little gasps of men make little gasp remarks And puff Abdullas in their elegant central parks.
A cross ... a cross ... and row on row the same Small cross without a name, Each silhouette so slim And, God, how ghastlily trim! And down beneath the skeletons are piled. ... But now a child Discovering some fraction of a bomb, Adventure-wild, Performs a jig with exquisite aplomb Over, who knows? a corpse or mandrake root (What matters it?) the charabancs toot-toot, The sky’s so very blue to-day And the soft turf yields To each well-fitting shoe: and they Bring their bananas and sandwiches To munch on the battle-fields.
_Green grow the Rushes, O_
And do the rushes grow so green Upon this chill All Hallows’ E’en That voices as a lutany Surge through my window-panes to die?
For in this room of rot and rust These dark red circles filled with dust, These sodden and lead-heavy eyes Long stunned with muted symphonies,
Are racked with the old hunger, hung With memory’s hard ice-flakes, stung By each note-star in crystal set To glint and pierce this lazaret.
O, why not let me wallow, bleed, Riot and guzzle in red greed, And leave my doom-gripped body tossed Into an agony of frost?
Cruel, marauding throats, begone! Before I hurl my curse upon Your youth, oh loathsome things, to try Torturing me with purity!
_Words_
In long prim rows the formal words distend, Stuffed birds with loosely-fitting beaks, they glare With beady eyes pathetically vague Beneath their sober domes of dusty glass. (Pale frigid flute-voiced children promenade To suck the air into their fading lungs, Native to soot: the tortoise-shell effect Of sunsets barred by buildings smug and bare And sleek pat streets of asphalt: gamins drab Whose nightingales the Cockney sparrows are. When furry frost hangs white about the chin, These too will cough a dirge, no doubt, and die!) O words, assert yourselves! from long prim rows Trip out and weave new patterns with the clouds That preen their swan-wings spread upon the air, Then loll like tufts of lilac heavily; Lush coolness, limpid nebulousness; where The dove-tame zephyrs leap in shapely loops To fill the windy trammel of a skirt, Or must we oil you with celebral sweat? When levers, springs and cogs are oiled you’ll come Naked and unembarrassed by the moon.
* * * * *
The words have answered, lo, the words advance No longer blocked in patterns, dribble out In pleasant drops, with bird-quick flickers trip Into a dissonance or discord: so, Sharp darts of dappled sound to cleave the ear. Some strut, and laughing madly, stridently, These crack their wind-swift fingers, or like ants Waving antennæ, struggle bravely on Beneath their heavy burdens, one or two Twinkle, then flutter off like hueless leaves, Or dart and flash like wagtails on a pool, Some fired with sulphurous glow, and some askew Sway perilously, like a drunkard’s hat. But what are these with puckered, pointed ears That flit among the crowds like strips of tape? They seem to stumble into tragedies. “Oh, we shall twine you merry wreaths,” they say, “Gay wreaths, festoons of entrails for your brow!” Their eyes like little glasses of liqueur Glitter and frighten me: within, without, Words with hot breath hiss subtly venomous, A million droning insects in my ears, A million mottled thrushes in my mind.
_Greenness Unsecreted_
In ombre gateways I had loitered, stopped To speak unto my nearest brother, Toad, Within the forest where the cobras propped Green twists on frothy treetops, their abode: “Toad, I salute you! in your chilly eye I see the mignonette of modesty.”
He did not answer, crouching like a sin, Steeped in a lethargy too dull to pierce, Centuple wisdom folded in his skin-- He stared with humble stare that was not fierce, And yet within that stare I seemed to know The stare that maddened Hieronymo.
I followed then a wedge of thoughtful cranes Who fled across the silence drearily From desolations and eternal rains Across the frozen ridge of Rhodope, The stars grown piteous of my misery Dropped golden tears into the poem-sea.
I have since dived, bathed in the poem-sea, In spilt genethliacs of amber wine Mellowed to milk, like turtle-feathers free Floating and flurry on the teasing brine, Below, I saw those youths that died of love And wandered with them in the myrtle grove.[A]
And when I rose a slender oaten pipe Made music in the entrails of my ears, Rich bandaliers of fruit grown pulpy-ripe Moistened the membranes and dissolved my fears, I could remember at her day of birth How Flora with her daisies strewed the earth.
But man still chased his jet-black butterflies, And looking up, as from a rippled cloud, Shunned me with viscous terror in his eyes, Then fell a-triply sewing at his shroud, Lest I should mar the self-fomenting strife And cultivated void that was his life.
[A] These two lines are derived from Pope.
_Back-Streets_
Inane perspective stretched behind the street: A wall, a yard, a wall, a yard, a wall, Patterned interminably, patterned neat With intervals of oblongs squat and tall.
A full moon dims the stars and here and there Glints on a bulging square of window-pane. Soon clinging sodden moistures glut the air And mists fall heavier than autumn rain.
Only one room of all these rooms is lit. Perhaps somebody watches, dreams absurd And sentimental dreams, and from this pit The ponderous bourdon of some heart is stirred.
Men live their packed exasperated lives, Callous and unfamiliar, yet each knows, In all these sordid chiaroscuro hives, His neighbour’s pleasures and his neighbour’s woes.
Through gutters of stagnations and defeats, Immense black ruins with the beds unmade, Interminable agonising streets, I walk alone, a stranger, and afraid
_Werther-Introspection_
“Talk to me somewhat quickly, Or my imagination will carry me To see her in the shameful act of sin.” _Duchess of Malfi._
The morning drums upon the window-pane, The evening drums upon the window-pane, I wait and wait and fumble in my brain....
All night I’ve lain with soul that could not rest. At dusk strange hands were tearing at my heart In a prim polar silence.
The stags and does may frolic in the woods And leap beyond the stars, for aught I care, Beyond those furbished clots of frigid light, Abstract and sad detached identities, Where they may anguish, fossilize or freeze.
All night I’ve lain upon the charming rack You manufactured: I shall not despair, Or coax a courteous isolated tear. But I shall hear my agonizing laughter Echoing far from floor to trembling rafter In brittle carillons like metal bells, And hear my bleached emaciated yells Burgeon in petalled peals, flamboyant, bright As merry moons in petticoats of white To hide their cancer and their leprosy.
Then: “Patience, rebel, calm!” the darkness said, “You’ll never choke time’s throat of beaten lead.” I did not heed.... I knew that my heart bled.
Near the pellucid lake--ah God, there stirred No animalculus, and an absurd Decorous silence humped its back and purred.
_On the Theme of Ophelia’s Madness_
“And will he not come again?” Ophelia wanders out into the rain That makes soft music on her yellow hair. “O, shall I then surrender to despair?” In vain she begs the strutting chanticleer And Tullia’s intellectual marmosyte, King Oberon a-lying on his bier And Leda’s downy swan. Throughout the night She listens to the noise of dead men’s bones, Sad subterranean murmurs drowned in sea-weed, Slow-drifting down jade silences.... --She hopes to screw some answer from their groans! But there’s a seal upon their lipless mouths.
“By all the moons that in the peacock’s tail Rival the heaven’s moon, I conjure a reply; has any seen My lover’s sandal-shoon? He wears a fluted cockle-hat, A staff of briar-wood, His hair’s coiled thick in a flaxen mat, And like a river in flood The crisp locks tumble on his poll.” She cried but there came no answer at all Save, God ha’ mercy on his soul!
“By molewarp’s brain and by pismire’s gall, Will he whom I love return again?” The pale grey rain For pity’s sake, Breathed her asleep in a lullaby, Till slothful Charon in his barge rowed by And ferried her gently over the Stygian lake.
_These Consolations_
I shall console myself by being absurd And sit among the rank, unwholesome dews, And watch each whining pheasant and each bird Guzzle the very-human bearded grain: I shall not weep beneath the dismal yews But to the milk-white turtles tune my pain.
Where spiny pines diffuse a noxious shade I’ll wage a series of intestine wars, The listening wolves grow milder in the glade Beneath the incense of the breathing Spring, Whilst every shepherd polishes his sores I’ll languish into life, and living, sing.
The women teem their babes; the sative plants Quiver as Cynthia fills her silver horn, The spicy forest and her sycophants, The fiery-pointed organons of sense, Attempt to catch the sound as it is born And, as it dies, the hush is thick and tense.
But even so the tensity can vex What I had hoped had blackened into jet, Like raven-feathers in the moon’s reflex, The feeble eyes of our aspiring thoughts, But even so the tensity can fret, And I must grope in unsuspected orts.... I shall console myself with being fed On hollow sapless tales and other slips, And to the pallid nations of the dead I’ll wander, and as soon as I arise A liquid film will glaze upon my lips, Upon my pores, impatient for the skies.
_In the Month of Athyr_[B]
These ruins seem a womb of cringing air, So thin that the ears tingle, flickering, And every barren plant is withering, Ready to snap, like glass, for sheer despair ... And through the ether mountains loom like bones So hollow you could scrape a melody Sounding like water from them, oozily To this sun-stricken desert-world of groans. The light is cruel: it is hard to read The letters on these stones, but, lo, the words: “_Lord Jesus Christ_” and further “_soul_”; what birds Erased the script with droppings? and what weed Has wrested from these crevices a home? “_In month of Athyr_” ... “_Lucius fell asleep_”.... His age is mentioned: he was young; and deep Beneath the damaged parts, as in a foam Of centuries I see, disfigured, “_tears_.” Then “_tears_” again, “_for us his friends who weep_”.... Lucius was much belovèd, it appears. In grey November ... Lucius fell asleep....
[B] The ancient Egyptian November (derived from a poem by C. P. Cavafy).
_Discoveries_
We have discovered many things To suit our moods, to give us wings: More than an Aristotle-tome In crimson splash of a fowl’s comb, In silver-boled unleaving trees Like organ-pipes along the breeze; Sometimes the notes run sharp and false When rooks and twigs join in the valse Of smooth and swaying treetop spun Like yarn across the copper sun.... But there are times when you would cry To hear the trees’ low melody. And we have watched the hemlock spray And smelt dank wafture of decay, The fume from tawny bellied leaves In spirals where the autumn grieves. With froth of flowers we have been rich-- The globuled frog-spawn on the ditch Was mottled with our wonder; vast Moist moans of raping bees’ repast Have sluiced our languid afternoons Like ripples crawling on lagoons. But we have not discovered yet How to erase, how to forget Sheer vividness of solitude, How to obliterate each mood To dim Antarctic memories, Merged icebergs twinkling in chopped seas.
_Old Woman_
Gaunt woman with pinched, palsied hands, Cramped fingers once their nimble slaves, Did your poor feet once print the sands With lovely dimpled curves like waves?
I’m told men once would march to wars, Your name upon their lips, would kneel Rapt by your eyes that fleered the stars, Where passions leapt like sparks from steel.